TextExpander and a Communications Perspective

The following may be more esoteric than useful for most, but that won’t stop me from making a screencast. It features a use of the program that may be only something I’d use myself, but is hard for me to tell, so feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I visit the Communications perspective twice daily. It contains contexts of Calls, Emails, Texts, and Waiting for. Once I’m through with the perspective, I avoid communications unless necessary. Altogether, it is a process of:

checking inboxes,

answering whatever can be answered in 2 minutes or less,

deleting whatever needs deleting,

filing as reference, and

assigning the rest as tasks Omnifocus.

25 Comments

Alan
on March 19, 2012 at 7:38 pm

Thanks Kourosh, good simple ideas there. I’m going to give it a try in my workflow.

Thanks so much for this one. I had seen the screencasts done by Sven, David, and Michael. I feel that going to the trouble of putting up these screencasts make them so much more helpful to folks like myself.

Keyboard Maestro macros also enhance OmniFocus in ways that aren’t possible via snippets. I think Michael’s recent Keyboard Maestro macro that pops a piece of selected text inside Evernote is quite elegant. Especially because getting things out of Evernote and into OmniFocus is not as straightforward as say popping things in from email, safari, and finder.

Any shares of Keyboard Maestro macros that enhance OmniFocus would be greatly appreciated by me and, I suspect, many others.

Thanks for the reply. I get it now. I hadn’t set up the Core perspective you describe in audio file 170. The screen shots, by the way, are extremely helpful. Thanks for doing such a thorough job on the audio version of this book, and for following up here on your site.

Thanks for the useful tips. I had always been frustrated by how OF handles following-up with delegated tasks. Your 3-step solution is fine. I had never used “Copy As Link” before and noticed that you can save the link as a snippet that can be pasted in the notes field of the associated action.

For example, if I want to call John about the new project, I could follow your procedure and create an action Discuss New Project > Agendas John and create a second actions Call John > Calls and then type xjo (the snippet abbreviation I created to link this action to John’s agenda list) in the notes field.

Use of Text Expander in this way saves the steps of having to go to the context view and clicking on the drop down menu, clicking on the Agenda’s context and choosing “Copy As Link” in the drop-down menu, every time you want to link an action to an agenda.

Recent Posts

OmniFocus is a registered trademark and is used under license by the Omni Group. For more information on The Omni Group products the user may visit their website at the Omni Group. For OmniFocus, please visit the OmniFocus homepage.

This product uses or is based on Getting Things Done® or GTD® Principles. It is not affiliated with, approved or endorsed by David Allen or the David Allen Company, which is the creator of the Getting Things Done® system for personal productivity. GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company For more information on the David Allen Company's products the user may visit their website at www.davidco.com.

Apple, Mac, Mac OS, iPad, Multi-Touch and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners